by Katie Ruggle
“Sure? There are leftover crab cakes from last night. Not to toot my own crustacean-cooking horn, but they’re pretty tasty.”
His smile widened, but he didn’t pause as he pulled on his boots. “I’ll have to try them another time.”
“Okay.” Daisy watched as he unfastened the multiple locks. Although she wanted to push him again to stay, it would just make her seem lonely and desperate. “Thanks again for Max.”
“You’re welcome again.” With a final crooked smile, he was gone.
And she was alone once more.
* * *
Sweat ran into her eyes, making them sting. Her knee connected with Max’s outer thigh. If he’d been a real boy, the nerve strike would’ve rendered that leg useless for a while. Moving back, she practiced front and side kicks until her legs were like noodles, and then moved to punches and palm-heel strikes.
When her wrapped hands felt too heavy to lift, she leaned against Max and gasped for breath. He swung away from her weight, so she wrapped her arms around his middle to stabilize them both. When she realized how they must look, Daisy gave a breathless laugh and forced her body to straighten.
“You really are the perfect man, Max,” she said, patting his belly. “I wake you up at two in the morning, beat you to a pulp, and you’re still willing to cuddle. How many men would put up with that?” A certain deputy sheriff came to mind, but she pushed the thought away before she got mopey. Looking down, she made a face as she pulled her sweat-soaked tank away from her skin. “Now I’m disgusting and need a shower. Good night, Max. Thanks for letting me assault you.”
The stairs loomed in front of her, mocking her with their steepness. Daisy wished she’d left a little juice in her leg muscles for the climb. With a whimper that almost made her glad no one else was within earshot, she forced her wobbly quads to lift high enough for her feet to clear each step.
She stopped in her room to get clean pajamas. As she passed the front window, the one she referred to as her “TV screen,” she stopped and moved closer. There was a sheriff’s department SUV parked at the curb in front of the Storvicks’ house.
“Corbin, you budding little psycho,” she muttered. “What did you do this time?”
Forgetting her aching legs, she scurried over to turn off the overhead light and then returned to her window seat. The Storvicks’ place was dark, and Daisy frowned. Had the deputy not gone up to the house yet? She’d been expecting shouting parents and a crying Corbin, not the current sleepy silence.
No one was in the driver’s seat of the SUV, though, so the deputy had to be somewhere. Maybe Corbin hadn’t done anything to his ex-girlfriend after all. Daisy looked around the area. Despite her immediate assumption that Corbin was the reason for the deputy’s visit, the squad SUV was actually parked closer to the for-sale house than the Storvicks’. Daisy thought of the movement she’d seen the previous night, and she wondered if there was a homeless person living there. The deputy could be responding to a trespassing call.
Daisy drummed her fingertips on the wall next to the window, trying to remember when Chris’s days off started. If he was working, then his shift started at seven a.m., so she could call him in a few hours, and he wouldn’t threaten to kill her. If he wasn’t working, however, he tended to sleep late to start getting his body ready for the approaching night shift. She knew from experience that, when woken, Chris was as grumpy as a bear that had been punched in the face.
Besides, his recent standoffishness had pushed her off-center. Daisy wasn’t sure where they stood at the moment. He’d been her friend—her only real-life, in-person friend—since she’d been sixteen. After eight years, they’d developed an easy, comfortable camaraderie, but she’d managed to mess that up in one impulsive second that she’d regretted ever since. It’d been movie night a few months ago, and they’d laughed in unison at some funny line. When she’d turned to look at Chris, she’d caught him staring at her with a strange, almost hungry expression. Her amusement had died, replaced by a longing so intense that she couldn’t stop herself from leaning closer and closer until their lips barely touched. She could have sworn he’d wanted to kiss her as much as she’d wanted to kiss him.
But then he’d jerked back as if she’d given him a static shock. Muttering some excuse, he’d escaped from her house as quickly as possible, leaving her to wallow in regret and humiliation. Ever since that night, Chris had been acting…weird. Except for the day of her mother’s murder, Daisy had never wished so hard for a do-over.
The thought of losing Chris was scary, so she shoved it out of her head and concentrated instead on the scene in front of her. An almost-full moon and a couple of streetlights illuminated the SUV and the yard immediately next to it. If she squinted, Daisy could make out the shadowed impressions of footprints in the day-old snow, leading around the far side of the house. Those must’ve been made by the deputy, she decided.
Daisy tried to figure out why uneasiness was simmering in her belly. Everything was so quiet and still, with everyone sleeping—everyone except for her, at least. The squad vehicle just didn’t fit with that peace. In her experience, cop cars brought action and noise and movement—or at least a visit from Chris. That must’ve been why the empty SUV seemed so eerie.
She shivered and blamed it on her sweaty, quickly drying tank top. Darting across the room, she grabbed the hoodie draped over her desk chair and pulled it on as fast as possible so she wouldn’t miss anything that might happen outside. As she was about to rush back to the window, her cell caught her eye, and she reached for it, sliding the phone into her hoodie pocket.
Daisy curled up on the window seat again. She knew from experience that she wouldn’t sleep if she tried to go back to bed after exercising, plus that odd, uneasy feeling hadn’t gone away. Resting her chin on her up-drawn knee, she watched, waiting for the deputy’s return.
The wind picked up, rushing past her window and making the pine tree branches scratch against the side of Daisy’s house. She pulled the hoodie more tightly around her and tucked her fingers under her arms to keep them warm. Clouds crept over the moon, darkening the shadows surrounding the house.
“No,” Daisy groaned. The streetlights mostly just lit the narrow circle of space around their poles, so it was much more difficult to see anything with the moonlight gone. The encroaching darkness sent her imagination into overdrive, making it too easy to picture all sorts of things hiding in the shadows. She leaned toward the glass, trying to make up for the dim lighting by getting as close as she could to the action—or lack of action.
She’d resisted getting binoculars in the past, since that always seemed like it would’ve pushed her neighborhood-watch activities out of “quirky” and right into “creepy.” Now, she regretted having qualms. In fact, a pair of night-vision binoculars would’ve been even better. So what if that shoved her squarely into creeperhood? At least she’d be able to see what was happening.
A break in the clouds revealed someone walking along the side of the empty house. Sucking in a startled breath, Daisy rose to her knees and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. She stared hard at the furtive figure.
The person’s shape was wrong. It wasn’t just the distortion of the shadows. Either an ogre was walking next to the empty house, or… Wishing once again for binoculars, she shifted, trying to find a better angle.
Then the wind cleared the clouds away from the moon, and she could see more clearly. The misshapen form was actually someone with a large bundle over his or her shoulder. Peering at the person, she decided from his size and the way he moved that he was definitely male.
After a half step of hesitation, he walked into the puddle of light circling one of the streetlamps. The lights on the SUV flashed, and the back hatch door lifted. Balancing the burden over his shoulder with one hand, he reached with the other to move something around, maybe making room.
“What?” Daisy muttered, confused. Th
e man next to the sheriff’s department vehicle wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was dressed head to toe in black, rather than the tan deputy uniform. Even their department-issued winter coats were tan. The wrapped bundle over his shoulder caught the glow of the streetlight, gleaming a familiar, semiglossy blue. Whatever the guy was carrying was wrapped in a tarp.
Closing her fingers around her phone, she pulled it out and tapped on the video app. The scene was strange enough that she felt like she needed to record it, even if it was just so she could watch it in the morning. In the light of day, the ominous feeling would be gone, and she could laugh at the way her overactive imagination had turned something innocuous into a nebulous threat.
No matter how she shifted, raising up or dropping low, Daisy couldn’t find the right angle to get a glimpse of the man in black’s face. Even if she had gotten a clear view, though, she probably wouldn’t have been able to identify him. She only knew Chris’s coworkers through his work anecdotes. She zoomed in her phone camera, but the image just got darker and grainier, rather than clearer.
Leaning forward, the man half-dropped, half-shoved the large bundle into the back of the SUV. The rear of the vehicle sagged a little, which meant the object must be heavy. There was an unsettling familiarity in the way the tarp-wrapped item fell, bulky and weighted, that sent a shiver across the back of her neck.
The black-clad man shoved at the bottom of the bundle. He’d managed to tuck the majority of it into the SUV when something dark escaped from the bottom of the rolled tarp, tumbled over the rear bumper, and fell to the ground.
Daisy sucked in a breath hard enough to scrape her throat. From her vantage point, that dropped item looked very much like a boot.
Chapter 2
Stunned by the possibility that there was a body in the back of the SUV, Daisy froze. She didn’t move as the man grabbed what was definitely a boot and chucked it into the back with what couldn’t be a dead human being…could it? He closed the back hatch door quietly. Any click or thump it might have made was buried under the whistling groan of the wind.
It wasn’t until the man opened the driver’s door and looked directly at her window that Daisy returned to life, leaping away from the glass so violently that she stumbled over her backtracking feet and fell, dropping her phone. It took her a few moments before she could scrape up the nerve to stand and approach the window again. By the time she got close enough to see the street, the SUV was gone.
“Stupid,” Daisy scolded herself, frantically looking in one direction and then the other, vainly trying to make out the red glow of taillights. There was nothing but darkness. “You could’ve gotten a good look at his face if you weren’t such a chicken. He couldn’t have seen you up here in the dark.” Giving up on getting another glimpse of the SUV, she slumped against the window. “At least you could’ve looked at the plate number.”
She rushed over to where her phone had fallen. Grabbing it, she pulled up her pathetically short list of contacts. Her finger hovered over Chris’s name first, and then her father’s. Her dad was in Connor Springs, installing solar panels on a new, high-end condo project. He was scheduled to be back that evening.
Her finger, poised above the screen, retreated before it tapped on either contact, and her arm dropped to her side. It was sinking in that she didn’t have anything concrete. There was no plate number, no way she could identify which deputy had tossed a human-shaped bundle into the back of a squad SUV, and no certainty that there was, in fact, a dead body currently being transported who knew where. All she had was some indistinct video footage of a dark form putting something into an SUV.
If she called either her dad or Chris tonight, they’d think she was imagining things. Worse, they might believe she’d expanded the boundaries of crazy-town, adding delusions to her current phobia. Her father would look at her with angry, helpless eyes and scratch his beard. In the short time he’d be staying at the house before leaving for another installation job, conversation would be infrequent and awkward. Daisy cringed at the thought.
Chris, on the other hand… Daisy wasn’t sure what he’d do. He’d been acting so squirrelly lately, and he might use this as a sign that he should stop telling her about his cases, especially the one revolving around the headless guy found in Mission Reservoir a couple of months ago. Worse, maybe he’d stop visiting her altogether.
Her breathing quickened, becoming harsh and shallow, and she closed her eyes. Daisy imagined hiking on a rocky trail, winding higher and higher until she reached the summit. In her mind, she turned around and could see the entire county spread out beneath her. The jagged edges of the lower peaks, furred with evergreens and aspen, smoothed into the flat plains. A distant herd of pronghorn grazed, and a pair of hawks circled in the impossibly blue sky. Daisy’s heart beat faster, not in fear of the expansive space, but at the sheer beauty of it all. After a few minutes, her breaths came slow and even, and she allowed her eyes to open.
Carefully, she placed her phone back on the bedside table. Maybe there was a way she could investigate on her own. The Simpson Star, the weekly local paper, would be online at noon. She could check the section where the emergency calls and responses were posted. If a deputy had been sent to number 304, it would show up in that week’s “Sheriff’s Report.” In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to check if any missing-persons reports had been filed recently.
Instead of logging on to her laptop, though, she sat on her bed, shifting until her back was against the headboard. Pulling one of her pillows out from under her hip, she wrapped her arms around it. As she stared at the window across the room, she hugged the pillow and tried not to think about dead bodies, murderous deputies…or how desolate her life would be without Chris in it.
* * *
The flames followed the line of gasoline, lighting the fumes with a whoosh. Tyler grinned. That was his favorite part, when the fire went from the tiny flicker of a lighter to a ravenous monster intent on consuming an entire building. Heart pounding, he watched as the pile of cardboard caught fire, red and black crawling around the edges of each piece before the yellow flames appeared, growing until they almost touched the garage rafters.
Tyler coughed, eyeing the thickening layer of smoke. As much as he wanted to watch the fire close up, it was time for him to leave. Breathing was getting harder, and the owner—or a neighbor—would notice the smoke and flames. That meant the big red trucks would be arriving soon…and so would his father.
A twinge of guilt ran through him as he moved toward the side door, the one not facing the house. Tyler had promised he’d quit, and he’d tried. It was just such a rush—the roar of flames, the crash of a collapsing structure, the spreading glow as tree after tree ignited in an ever-widening circle, all because of him. He’d created that destruction with some accelerant and a flick of his lighter. It was tempting to tell everyone at school, all those kids who thought he was nothing—when they even thought of him at all. Tyler wouldn’t tell, though. His dad had a hard enough time covering for him as it was.
Cracking open the door, he checked for any observers. A breeze brushed through the doorway, and the flames crackled and danced. After admiring the growing fire for a proud moment, Tyler slipped outside and darted for the cover of the trees.
It only took another minute or two before a cry came from the house, and the owner ran outside, wearing a coat over her pajamas. Tyler watched as she shouted into her cell phone while struggling to hook up the garden hose with her free hand.
The woman reminded him a little of Lou, and he shifted as he remembered, exhilaration and guilt surging through him. That had been the first time he’d set a fire knowing someone was inside. It had been freaky and intense to see her lying limp on the couch in a drugged sleep, to know that he was about to kill her. He’d felt a little bad, since she’d always been nice to him, but she’d been too interested in Willard Gray’s death. She had to be stopped.
T
yler’s dad always told him that being a man meant accepting responsibility. When Lou wouldn’t stop poking around in the Gray investigation, Tyler knew he had to take action. His dad was always protecting Tyler. It’d been his turn to protect his father. He’d failed, though. Lou had lived.
A wail of a siren brought his attention back to his current creation—and destruction. The windows blew out in a shower of broken glass, and Tyler couldn’t hold back an exultant laugh. He’d done that. The garage owner cried out and shifted away from the building, the forgotten hose still clutched in her hand. She stared at the fire, her face and body lit by the flames, as water poured from the hose and pooled uselessly around her feet.
The fire trucks pulled up to the curb just seconds before the sheriff department SUV arrived. Tyler’s dad climbed out of the driver’s seat, his gaze scanning the tree line. Even though Tyler knew he was hidden, he couldn’t stop himself from shrinking farther behind a pine, instinctively trying to avoid that piercing gaze.
The wind picked up, making the flames shoot higher into the night sky. Since Tyler’s gaze was locked on his father, he saw the sheriff’s jacket flap open, revealing a black top that wasn’t his uniform shirt. As if he’d felt his son’s eyes on him, Rob glanced down and then zipped his coat, the tan one with “Sheriff” emblazoned on the back.
As his dad headed toward the fire chief, Tyler gave the fire one last longing glance before disappearing into the trees.
* * *
“Looking a little rough there, Dais.”
Yawning, she shrugged, too sleepy to be concerned about her bed head. Once Chris was through the doorway, she allowed the door to close behind him and fumbled with the locks. Her hand-eye coordination apparently took longer to awaken than the rest of her.
“What are you doing up so early?” she asked when she eventually managed to secure the final chain.
“It’s ten.” He paused in the middle of untying his boots to look up at her. “That’s not early. In fact, you could probably call that late.”
